Cuerpo y sociedades oralesuna reflexión sobre la concepción del cuerpo y sus implicaciones en el estudio de la prehistoria

Résumé

The origin and purpose of this PhD thesis is to make the body a useful tool for those studies dedicated to investigating the different ways of being a person in Prehistory. Assuming the body is an essential component of the study of identity in any context, this study aims at devising an Archaeology of corporeality in order to bring its potential to the study of prehistoric societies without extending present conditions to the past. Therefore, the body demands a deconstruction exercise, not only about the concept of “body” but of its perception and the role it possesses in the construction and reconstruction of person in Prehistory. Consequently, most of the efforts have been directed to reconstruct the conditions that could define that prehistoric context. On one hand, I turned to the instruments that Archaeology of Identity and Professor Almudena Hernando purpose to compare particular socio-economic contexts with certain ways of representing and organizing reality. And on the other hand, I analyzed the intellectual, existential and ontological consequences that means to live under the conditions of Orality, closer to those that prevailed in Prehistory. The review of anthropological texts about current societies whose life conditions can be compared to those under which lived prehistoric groups, closes the interpretative circle that helps to reconstruct an approximate context from which recreate an alternative corporeality model to the present and closer to the past. The research results have given rise to the proposals that follow: - The need to abandon any approach that understands concepts or ideas as real beyond their practical performance: in Prehistory it is not possible to conceive body as a concept, that is, as an objective reality likely to be thought apart from person. - It is assumed that a reality that can not be thought can only be acted or displayed: person, in this sense, can not conceive his or her existence apart from what he or she does. - The ontological implication the body reaches in such conditions is complete, to the point to say that if person is action, this is equivalent to assume that person is all body. - The aim is, therefore, to understand prehistoric people as narrativized subjects, that is, only defined by the language of action and body dispositions. - In an oral context of increasing socio-economic complexity, it can be assumed that there is a structural relation between the ‘discovery’ of the body as a scene of subject expression and processes of self-awareness and individuation: this is confirmed by an increase of attention to the body, as well as by the process of abstraction that leads to the creation of the image of ‘warrior’s body’, emphasized in moments of high socio-political tension as power symbol separated of its practical immediacy. This thesis works directly on the ontological processes of prehistoric subject, addressed through corporeality and the performativity of its being-in-the-world. The inability to separate a discourse entirely referred to the body from another settled in Reason, proposes a new interpretative perspective to any study focused on the construction of prehistoric subject. In this sense, the projective nature of this nature of this thesis prevents the design of a method or the creation of a model. Instead, the proposals open a way to further improve the tools that lead to a better interpretation of the past. This way, its theoretical character serves the aim of learning, indispensable in any research exercise